Sunset and Moonrise

This poem is from the collection Astrophel and Other Poems, Book I of The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Vol. VI.

197379Sunset and MoonriseAlgernon Charles Swinburne

New Year's Eve, 1899

All the west, whereon the sunset sealed the dead year's glorious
grave
Fast with seals of light and fire and cloud that light and fire
illume,
Glows at heart and kindles earth and heaven with joyous blush and
bloom,
Warm and wide as life, and glad of death that only slays to save.
As a tide-reconquered sea-rock lies aflush with the influent wave
Lies the light aflush with darkness, lapped about by lustrous
gloom,
Even as life with death, and fame with time, and memory with the
tomb
Where a dead man hath for vassals Fame the serf and Time the slave.

Far from earth as heaven, the steadfast light withdrawn, superb,
suspense,
Burns in dumb divine expansion of illimitable flower:
Moonrise whets the shadow's edges keen as noontide: hence and
thence
Glows the presence from us passing, shines and passes not the
power.
Souls arise whose word remembered is as spirit within the sense:
All the hours are theirs of all the seasons: death has but his
hour.